A quarter of US households are cord cutters

"Findings from market and consumer information firm GfK show that US TV households are embracing alternatives to cable and satellite reception. Levels of broadcast-only reception and Internet-only video subscriptions have both risen over the past year, with fully one-quarter (25 per cent) of all US TV households now going without cable and satellite reception.
The research, from GfK’s 2016 Ownership and Trend Report from The Home Technology Monitor, shows that 17 per cent of US TV households now rely on broadcast-only (a.k.a. ‘over-the-air’ or OTA) reception, up from 15 per cent in 2015. Another 6 per cent say they only use Internet services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or YouTube and do not have traditional broadcast or pay-TV reception at all; this compares with 4 per cent a year ago.
TV households with a resident between 18 and 34 years old are much more likely to be opting for alternatives to cable and satellite; 22 per cent of these homes are using broadcast-only reception (versus 17 per cent of all US households), and 13 per cent are only watching an Internet service on their TV sets (versus 6 per cent of all TV homes). Overall, 38 per cent of 18-to-34 households rely on some kind of alternative TV reception or video source, versus 25 per cent of all homes."

Source:  Advanced Television, 13th July 2016

Orders taken during Amazon Prime Day 2016 were 60% up year on year

"The second annual Prime Day was the biggest day ever for Amazon. Amazon today announced customer orders surpassed Prime Day 2015 by more than 60% worldwide and more than 50% in the U.S. It was also the biggest day ever for Amazon devices globally and record Prime Day for each Amazon device category including Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers and Alexa-enabled devices. Prime Day was a great savings day too – members globally saved more than double on deals over Prime Day 2015.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160713005901/en/
“Prime itself is the best deal in the history of shopping, and Prime Day was created as a special benefit exclusively for our Prime members,” said Greg Greeley, Vice President, Amazon Prime. “We want to thank our tens of millions of members around the world for making this the biggest day in the history of Amazon. We hope you had as much fun as we did. After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again.”
Prime Day 2016 highlights globally:
Sold over 2.5x more Amazon Fire TV devices compared to Prime Day last year – Fire TV Stick was the best-selling Amazon device.
More than two million toys and more than one million pairs of shoes were purchased by customers on Prime Day 2016.
More than 90,000 TVs were purchased on Prime Day 2016.
Hundreds of thousands of Kindle e-readers sold on Prime Day.
Prime member orders on the Amazon app surpassed Prime Day 2015 mobile app orders by more than 2x.
More than a million customers used the Amazon app for the first time on Prime Day to shop and to watch-a-deal.
The Prime Photos sweepstakes had two million submissions worldwide during the lead-up to Prime Day, the winner will be randomly selected on or about July 14.
Prime Day 2016 highlights from the U.S.:
Amazon devices were up over 3x compared to Prime Day last year.
Biggest day ever for Amazon Echo – up over 2.5x compared to previous record day.
The most popular Amazon Dash Button brands purchased on Prime Day were Cascade, Charmin and Tide.
Members purchased over 215,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Multi-Functional Pressure Cookers.
Members purchased over 200,000 headphones.
Members purchased over 24,000 Double Hammocks by Vivere.
Members purchased over 23,000 iRobot Roomba 614 Vacuum Cleaning Robots.
Members purchased over 14,000 Lenovo laptops.
Members purchased on average one Alexa-exclusive deal per second during Prime Day using their voice.
Prime members had exclusive access to deals on top rated TV series and blockbuster movies to rent or purchase and instantly stream on the Amazon Video app on TVs, mobile devices, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire tablets, or online – the top three Prime Day deal titles purchased or rented were: Deadpool, Kung Fu Panda 3 and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
The most selected Audible audiobook on Prime Day was A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1."
Source:  Press release from Amazon, 13th July 2016

The Amazon Echo has sold an estimated 3m units in the US

"Many products seem fascinating to geeks and techies but fail to catch on with wider audiences, from dual-booting smartphones to smart blowdryers. However, the Amazon Echo seems to be a real hit, with a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimating the retail giant has sold 3 million of the smart speakers.
The Amazon Echo, which uses the cloud-based AI Alexa to answer queries, control smart home devices and play games with users, has seen plenty of support from Amazon, with new abilities added almost every week. But consumers seem to have seen the value as well."

Source:  Geekwire, 6th April 2016

US Smartphone users have 76 sessions per day on average, over 2.4 hours, with 2,617 touches

Key points -
“The average user engaged in 76 separate phone sessions a day. Heavy users (the top 10%) averaged 132 sessions a day.
Phone screen time was 2.42 hours for the average user, and 3.75 hours for the heavy user. That was time spent on everything from typing texts, swiping on Tinder, turning Kindle pages, and scrolling in Facebook.
People tapped, swiped and clicked a whopping 2,617 times each day, on average.
Nearly half of touches were guided by apps made by Alphabet and Zuckerberg. The other half were split among the other 700+ apps.”

Source - Analysis from dscout, 16th June 2016
Methodology:
"dscout’s web-based research platform pairs with a smartphone app to capture in-the-moment behaviors. For this study, we recruited a demographically diverse sample of 94 Android users from our pool of more than 100,000 participants. Then we built a supplementary smartphone tool to track every user’s interaction across 5 days, 24 hours a day.
And by every interaction, we mean every tap, type, swipe and click. We’re calling them touches."

Spotify has 100m active users

"Swedish music streaming service Spotify said on Monday its user base had grown to 100 million, up from 75 million previously, as it pushed into new markets and despite competition from the likes of Apple Music.
Spotify has the music streaming industry's biggest paid subscriber base, with 30 million users paying to listen, but the vast majority still tune in for free with commercial breaks.
Competition is fierce with Apple Music launched just last year and already claiming 13 million paid users while Alphabet's Google competes with Google Music and Youtube.
Sources have told Reuters that Amazon.com Inc is preparing its own standalone service.
Spotify, founded in 2006, pays more than 80 percent of its revenue to record labels and artists and has not yet shown a profit as it spends to grow internationally.
Last year, it made an operating loss of 184.5 million euros ($209 million), widening from 165.1 million in 2014."

Source:  Reuters, 20th June 2016
Update - This report estimates that there are 37m paying subscribers

Instagram posts per user is falling

"Five times as many people now use Instagram as did in 2013. But despite that strong growth, Instagram has seen a worrisome trend. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of photos shared on average by each Instagram user fell, said two people briefed on the app’s internal data.
And just as its parent Facebook has been trying to reverse a drop in how much people share about their lives on the social network, Instagram has to figure out how to deal with the decline in “sharing” on its service. Otherwise over time people may gradually visit Instagram less and gravitate to rival apps, particularly Snapchat, which in the past year or two has gotten much more buzz than Instagram."

Source:  The Information, 30th June 2016

Over 400m people are using mobile ad blocking browsers

"We explored the numbers of app downloads from over 100 Google and Apple app stores across the globe in partnership with Priori Data, and drew data from StatCounter’s network of over 3 million Web sites.
Here are the key findings of our research:
At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
As of March 2016 in Europe and North America, there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
20% of the world’s smartphone users are using mobile adblocking browsers, which are mobile browsers that block ads by default. This is an order of magnitude greater than many had believed."

Source:  Data from PageFair, in INMA, 20th June 2016

Note - Page Fair sell services that combat ad blocking, so while I'm not disputing these numbers, it's in their interests to say that ad blocking is on the rise

2.3m in the UK watched a live stream of the ENG vs. WAL game at Euro 2016

"BBC Online attracted record breaking digital figures for the home nations Euro 2016 clash between England and Wales on June 16th with 2.3 million unique browsers watching online, more than double the previous record, while a peak audience of 9.3 million million people (73 per cent share) tuned in on BBC One.
An all-time high audience of 14.6 million unique global browsers visited the BBC Sport website on the day to follow coverage of Euro 2016, including Northern Ireland’s match against Ukraine. This breaks the previous record of 13.6 million browsers set on the final day of the 2015-16 Premier League season."
Source:  Advanced Television, 17th June 2016

Smart TVs account for over half of TVs shipped

"An important milestone was passed in early 2016: more than half of TV sets shipped globally in first quarter 2016 were smart TVs. The acceleration in the uptake of internet-connected TVs was led by China, where four out of five TV sets shipped with smart functionality. Meanwhile, despite a seasonally quiet quarter, 56 per cent of North American TV shipments were smart TVs, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight.
“It is a remarkable result,” said Paul Gray, principal analyst for IHS Technology. “China and North America continue to experience growth in the share of smart TVs, and the feature is now established in entry-level products.”"

Source:  Advanced TV, 29th June 2016

TV out-performs digital for ad attention and recall

"Speaking at the annual Nielsen Consumer 360 event, the Council for Research Excellence (CRE) unveiled findings from a new platform usage study that show TV outperforming computer, smartphone and tablet in viewer ad attention and recall.
The study, conducted by Hub Entertainment Research, was designed to compare viewing of TV shows and advertising across screens to determine whether engagement and recall differ among platforms, and to identify the drivers that have the greatest impact on the viewing experience.
Key findings include:
Attention to advertising and ad recall, two important measures of advertising engagement, are similar among viewers using computer, smartphone and tablet, but higher among those watching a TV set. For ad recall, 62 per cent of TV viewers were able to recall half or more advertisers, followed by tablet (47 per cent), smartphone (46 per cent) and computer (45 per cent). For attentiveness, 29 per cent of participants rated TV an 8-10 on a 10-point scale where 10 means complete attention, ahead of smartphone (23 per cent), computer (20 per cent) and tablet (17 per cent).
Enjoyment, a measure of programme engagement, was high across all platforms but especially so among smartphone viewers.
Platform experience is related to actual screen size. Independent of other factors, the viewing experience was significantly more positive among TV set viewers. 89 per cent of participants rated TV an 8-10 on a 10-point scale for enjoyment, followed by tablet (63 per cent), computer (54 per cent) and smartphone (53 per cent).
Multi-tasking negatively impacts engagement with ads (sponsor recall) but not with show (plot recall). In addition, the study found that very little multi-tasking behaviour (7-11 per cent, depending on the platform) during ads was related to the brands featured in the ads themselves."

Source:  Advanced TV, 30th June 2016

Note - I'm assuming this is a US study

Online video accounts for 20% of viewing on a TV screen in US broadband homes

Source:  Parks Associates, 22nd June 2016

Google & Facebook 'get 75% of all new online ad spending'

"The bulk of spending by brands on digital advertising is going to Google and Facebook. Combined, they accounted for 75 per cent of all new online ad spending in 2015, according to the Internet Trends report published this month by Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the US venture capital fund. In the US, 85 cents of every new dollar spent on digital went to the two companies in the first quarter of 2016.
This matters because digital is fast becoming advertising’s biggest source of revenue. It will eclipse television in the US next year , according to eMarketer, the research firm, with the lion’s share likely to go to the digital duopoly of Facebook and Google. Executives in Cannes put a brave face on what this might mean for their industry but the consequences of two companies becoming the gatekeepers for most digital advertising are profound."
Source:  FT, 23rd June 2016

Note - I'm assuming that this is a global figure